| Jazz |
Federico Casagrande’s Gentle Riders Finds the Road Trip Inside the Cowboy Myth. A Kerouac-Spirited Jazz Journey West.
There’s a moment on almost every great road-movie soundtrack where the dialogue stops and the landscape simply gets to speak. Gentle Riders, the new album from guitarist Federico Casagrande, lives almost entirely in that moment. It’s an album about America’s mythic open spaces — deserts, forests, endless plains — but it isn’t really about America at all. It’s about what happens to a person, and to a piece of music, when there’s nothing left to do but keep moving and pay attention.
Federico is a guitarist who never stood still. Casagrande’s own path has a certain restlessness built into it. Trained in classical guitar in Italy before a scholarship sent him to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2006, he went on to take first prize at the Gibson Montreux Jazz Festival Guitar Competition in 2007 with George Benson chairing the jury, no small stamp of approval. In the years since, he’s built a catalogue of eighteen albums as leader or co-leader, moving fluidly between acoustic solo work and electric trios and quartets, and collaborating with musicians as varied as pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, bassist Steve Swallow, saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti, and accordion virtuoso Vincent Peirani, whose trio Jokers Casagrande has toured with since 2018.
That range of settings — duo, trio, solo, electric, acoustic — has clearly given him an ear for space and negotiation: how much a player needs to say, and how much can simply be implied. Gentle Riders puts that instinct to its most patient use yet.
The Cowboy, Reimagined.
Where a lesser record might have leaned into pedal steel pastiche or genre cosplay, Casagrande does something more interesting: he takes the cowboy not as a costume but as a psychological state. The album quietly dismantles the stoic, invincible cowboy of popular imagination and replaces him with someone more porous, someone allowed to be uncertain, tender, even afraid. It’s less about lassos and saloons than about what a person becomes when the horizon is the only company they have.
It’s hard not to hear an echo of Jack Kerouac in that framing, and the connection feels earned rather than decorative. Kerouac’s writing — restless, road-bound, hungry for landscape as a way of understanding the self — shares Casagrande’s core instinct: that the vastness outside a person and the vastness inside them are, in the end, the same terrain. Gentle Riders moves the way On the Road reads, not plot-driven, but momentum-driven, propelled by the belief that the journey itself is the point. The album’s long, unhurried phrases and its comfort with silence suggest a similar patience: a willingness to let time stretch out rather than rushing toward a destination, which is very much in keeping with the Beat sensibility Kerouac helped define.
Whether or not Casagrande had Kerouac specifically in mind, the album ends up asking a very Kerouac-like question: is this really about cowboys and deserts, or is it about learning to wander toward your own horizon and stay in awe of what you find there?
Crucially, none of this tips into pastiche. Gentle Riders never tries to sound like a country or Americana record. It absorbs those idioms the way a traveller absorbs scenery, without imitating it stroke for stroke. Jazz remains clearly in the driver’s seat throughout, in dialogue with folk and Americana textures rather than dissolved into them, which is what keeps the whole thing feeling like a genuinely new place rather than a themed excursion.
The album unfolds over eight tracks, seven of them written by Casagrande himself, with the excellent loping “Bunch of Fellows” contributed by drummer Stephane Adsuar. Across the record, the core trio — Casagrande on guitar, Renard on double bass, and Adsuar on drums — plays with the kind of unhurried trust that only comes from musicians genuinely listening to each other rather than performing at each other.
The clear centrepiece is “Good Night Mongolia”, which stands apart from the rest of the record as something closer to a film score than a jazz tune. With special guest Vincent Peirani on accordina — a hybrid instrument blending the tonal richness of the accordion with the breath and intimacy of the harmonica — the track conjures the kind of widescreen, dust-blown tension you’d expect from a top-tier Clint Eastwood Western. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Ennio Morricone nodding along to this one: there’s the same sense of scale, the same patient build, the same feeling that danger and beauty are sitting right next to each other on the horizon. Peirani’s accordina adds a plaintive, almost vocal quality that pushes the track even further into cinematic territory. A composition that, on its own, makes this album worth buying.
The rest of the record moves through complementary shades of that same widescreen mood — from the wry melancholy suggested by opener “Real Cowboys Do Cry,” through the searching, open-ended title track “Gentle Riders,” to the wistful “Paradiso Perduto” and the wry, philosophically loaded closer “Existentialism in the Life of a Modern Cowboy,” whose title alone tells you exactly how far this record has travelled from the genre’s usual swagger.
Gentle Riders is a record about the space between things, between silence and melody, between America’s mythology and its reality, between the cowboy as icon and the cowboy as a person quietly holding himself together. Casagrande doesn’t need to raise his voice to make his point, he trusts the wide-open spaces of the music, much as Kerouac trusted the road, to say what needs saying. It’s a patient, generous, quietly moving album, and “Good Night Mongolia” alone is worth the price of admission for anyone who’s ever wanted a Morricone score that never got made.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, August 12th, 2026
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Tracklist
- Real Cowboys Do Cry
- The Infinite Never Abandons
- Take Me Away With You
- Good Night Mongolia (feat. Vincent Peirani – accordina)
- Bunch of Fellows
- Gentle Riders
- Paradiso Perduto
- Existentialism in the Life of a Modern Cowboy
All compositions by Federico Casagrande, except “Bunch of Fellows,” written by Stephane Adsuar.
Musicians:
Federico Casagrande – guitars
Etienne Renard – double bass
Stephane Adsuar – drums
Special guest:
Vincent Peirani – accordina on “Good Night Mongolia”